While the world urgently hopes to reduce GHG emissions from fossil fuels and deforestation, the Brazilian
Amazon offshore potentially becomes a new frontier for oil companies. The expected impact of oil royalties on
the regional GDP is a political driving force pro-exploration. We advocate that the Brazilian Amazon offshore
must remain oil exploration-free and that the country could give up its sovereign right to explore oil locally while
replacing oil royalties with “green royalties”. Therefore, we propose that the region could benefit from creating a
trust fund covering the same amount of royalties that the area would receive from the country’s decision not to
allow oil exploration in the region.
Systemic Conservation, REDD, and the Future of the Amazon Basin
The environmental movement has won hundreds of critical battles, but it is losing the war. The capacity of the planet to sustain life is declining (Brown 2011). In this essay, we introduce the concept of systemic conservation as a response to this global...



